“The most normal thing about normal people is how weird we are.” Louis Theroux said that during his conversation with Rory Sutherland at Nudgestock, and I thought it was a rather reassuring place to start. Particularly in a room full of people who’d voluntarily spent a day discussing human behaviour. I could have listened to those two all day. Their conversation was the highlight for me, wandering through humour, vulnerability, evil and the possibility that a funny AI might be more dangerous than a clever one. The theme of Nudgestock 2026 was trust. We’ve been supporting Nudgestock in one way or another at 42courses since the beginning, and this year gave me plenty to think about, along with a few things worth trying at work. Here are the bits that stayed with me. 1. Louis Theroux on trust / AI / humour / and evilness Louis Theroux suggested that recognising we’re all struggling is a good starting point for trust. Most of us are trying to appear slightly more capable and composed than we feel, so there’s something comforting about meeting someone who lets that pretence slip a little. Humour helps. He quoted Jimmy Carr’s line that “the shortest distance between two people is a joke”, then wondered whether the most dangerous development in AI would be a really good sense of humour. It’s a lovely, slightly alarming thought. We spend a lot of time asking whether we’ll trust a machine because it’s accurate. What happens when we trust it because it makes us laugh? You can imagine knowing perfectly well that you ought to be sceptical, then finding yourself thinking, yes, but it is very funny. Louis also explored the uncomfortable experience of liking someone whose behaviour you find appalling. He described feeling protective towards Joe Exotic’s vulnerability, even while needing to ask him difficult questions for his documentary. His observation about evil was particularly strong; he said it’s sometimes shallow. People can act selfishly and cause terrible harm without much reflection on what they’re doing. We look for some complicated inner darkness when there may be very little inner examination at all. My takeaway was essentially that warmth, humour and vulnerability can help us connect with someone, but liking them doesn’t settle whether we should trust their judgement or their actions. For something practical to take back to your team, Google’s FOCUS Playbook explores the human side of AI adoption, with advice on building confidence, keeping people’s judgement involved and turning experiments into useful everyday habits. 2. How to do exceptional customer service Rebecca Dibb-Simkin’s example from Octopus Energy was much more practical, and I particularly liked it because I’ve recently experienced it myself. She described customer service organised into teams of ten. The idea is that your problem stays with a person who deals with it, with colleagues in that small team able to pick it up when they’re away. You have continuity, rather than having to introduce yourself and your increasingly tragic history with the company every time you get in touch. Recently, my energy bill looked a bit odd because the battery connected to my solar panels wasn’t working properly. Octopus sorted the issue out straight away and credited my account with £40 to say sorry. What made the difference was how easy they made it. Someone dealt with the problem, and I could get on with my day. That’s the point of the small-team arrangement Rebecca described: a customer shouldn’t have to navigate a telephone menu, remember a case number or manage the handover between departments just to get help. The company takes responsibility for keeping track. It’s worth trying your own customer service with that in mind. How much of the work of getting a problem resolved have you quietly handed to the person who has it? 3. Trust / shareholder meetings / and why we should fiddle with things less Alex Edmans shared research by Yuanzhi Li and David Yermack into companies holding shareholder meetings in inconvenient places. In their study of meetings between 2006 and 2010, firms that held meetings at least 50 miles from both headquarters and a major airport underperformed market benchmarks by 6.8% over the following six months. Here, “remote” means geographically awkward, rather than joining on Zoom with your microphone off. Read the research summary here. It’s a historical finding, rather than a stock-picking rule, but the question behind it is a good one: how easy does an organisation make it to ask an awkward question? You can learn quite a lot by looking at that. Anyone can say they welcome scrutiny; but how easy do we really make it for that scrutiny to happen? Alex also shared the wonderfully humbling finding that men traded shares 45% more than women in a study of over 35,000 US brokerage households. Trading reduced men’s annual net returns by 2.65 percentage points, compared with 1.72 for women. These were accounts studied in the 1990s, but the temptation to confuse activity with ability still feels familiar. Read Barber and Odean’s study here. Plenty of situations at work call for that reminder. Before changing the campaign, rewriting the plan or having another little fiddle, it’s worth asking what new evidence has actually arrived. 4. Five minutes to become a team As an ex-pilot, I particularly liked easyJet Chief Training Captain Mark Farquhar’s description of the “Golden Five”: five minutes in the briefing for crew members to get to know each other before flying. They may never have met before, so this is time to chat about themselves and find out how everyone’s doing. Knowing a little about someone’s day can change how you interpret their behaviour. A quiet colleague might have something on their mind; assuming they’re uninterested won’t help you work together. Those few minutes help strangers become comfortable with each other before they need to act as a team. Making it easier to raise a concern is part of that, but so is understanding the person raising it. It reminded me of Google’s work on teams. Its guidance for hybrid meetings explicitly recommends using the first five minutes to connect. That’s practical guidance rather than proof that five minutes is a magic number, but it’s a useful idea to borrow. We’re often so keen to get straight to the agenda that we skip the bit that might help us work through it together. 5. How to spot trust giveaways Body-language expert Adrianne Carter suggested three things to notice when someone might be feeling uncertain: feet turning away or towards the door, self-soothing movements such as rubbing the neck, and a one-sided shoulder shrug. I’d treat these as reasons to check in with someone, rather than a system for reading their mind. Feet pointing towards the exit might also belong to someone who needs the loo. The useful habit is paying attention when someone’s apparent comfort doesn’t quite match their words. Instead of assuming their polite agreement settles everything, leave room for them to tell you what’s worrying them. A simple “Is there anything you’re unsure about?” gives you rather more to work with than your own interpretation of a shoulder. 6. A Classic Rory Sutherland framing example Rory had a marvellous example of how numbers can tell us one thing and make us feel another. His electric car has a range of roughly 300 miles. Returning from Wales with 50 miles remaining, he felt anxious because the battery indicator showed 16%. However, in his wife’s early electric Mini, with its roughly 100-mile range, those same 50 miles show a reassuring 50%, so in that car, with 50 miles to go, he’s not anxious at all. Rory’s point was that range anxiety has a physical part and a psychological part. Improving batteries matters, but so does understanding what makes drivers worry. There may be useful work to do on the dashboard as well as under the bonnet. That’s what keeps me coming back to Nudgestock. You leave with things you can actually try, whether that’s giving people a few minutes to get to know each other or checking whether your wonderfully helpful dashboard is quietly frightening them. For me, the useful question to take back to work is: what does this feel like for the person on the other end? It’s surprisingly easy to forget when we’re busy making things more efficient. And if the answer seems a little odd, Louis did warn us. We’re all rather weird.